The articles by Kees van Kersbergen and Daniele Caramani constitute an impressive joint plea in favour of descriptive analyses within comparative politics. They also warn, less convincingly, against an alleged obsession of the discipline with variation that, according to them, does not do justice to the similarity of many cases. This response demonstrates that limiting the analysis to similar c...

ACENTURY FROM NOW, social and demographic historians may be pondering the question of why the topic of teenage childbearing suddenly became so prominent in America during the last several decades of the twentieth century. The issue emerged from social invisibility during the 1950s and early 1960s, when rates of childbearing among teens reached historical peaks, and rose to a level of public obs...

n modern culture, beauty reigns supreme. Everywhere we look—whether it's magazines, TV shows or movies—beautiful people dominate. We aspire to be beautiful and if we're not, we are intrigued by the possibility of becoming so. Witness the popularity of shows such as "Extreme Makeover" and "Dr. 90210." Our quest for beauty isn't a modern obsession. Philosophers and poets chronicle the importance ...

In this essay we introduce the idea of an epistemic triangle, with factual, theoretical, and conceptual investigations at its vertices, and argue that whereas scientific progress requires a balance among the three types of investigations, psychology’s epistemic triangle is stretched disproportionately in the direction of factual investigations. Expressed by a variety of different problems, this...

Historically, the fact that the people of Mindanao and Sulu were able to successfully resist all attempts to subjugate them only increased the obsession of the Spanish colonial government and of the church hierarchy to conquer the south and to convert the people to Catholicism. Thus was created the "Moro Problem" which, in the mind of colonial officials, was simply the problem of creating effec...

This paper explains why Indonesia’s competitiveness is falling, compared with other countries, while the economic growth seemed quite robust in recent years. After the commodity boom and quantitative easing policy was over, Indonesia is struggling to compete in the world market resulting a low rate of participation in the global production network. In addition, unclear industrial policy, downst...

Objective: Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is chronic psychiatric disorder with high rate of relapse during the course of illness. It is not well known which factors contribute for the chronicity of the illness, mainly because there are confounding factors as the medication effect. In this study we compared the difference of neurocognitive functions of the first-episode, medication-naive OC...

9/11 has been something of a personal obsession. Disproportionality so. For while the events 11 September 2001 were truly horrifying and terrible, death toll, economic consequences, thre...

The current study sought to explore into whether women are obsessed with ‘white’ weddings.  It examined the various possible factors/variables attributed to this assertion. The researchers employed a qualitative case study approach to examine the phenomenon. Thirty single women at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana were sampled using the purposive sampling technique. ...

Objective: Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is chronic psychiatric disorder with high rate of relapse during the course of illness. It is not well known which factors contribute for the chronicity of the illness, mainly because there are confounding factors as the medication effect. In this study we compared the difference of neurocognitive functions of the first-episode, medication-naive OC...